AWARDING THE PRIZES 288 XXVIII. SATO WRITES HOME 293 WON IN THE NINTH CHAPTER I THE WINTER TERM “Eyah! Eyah! Hughie, RAH-RAH.” A wiry red-haired boy about twenty-three years old swung lightly from the train with a big valise in his hand into a crowd of college boys in caps and heavy ulsters. They gathered round him at once, and while one crowd took charge of his valise, he was lifted on to the shoulders of a half dozen fellows and carried through the streets to his rooms in Elihu Dormitory. In a twinkling his rooms and the halls outside were blocked with the lads of Lowell who had come to welcome the most popular boy in school, Hughie Jenkins. It was the day of the opening of the winter term of the University. Hughie Jenkins had been the successful manager for three years of the College Baseball team and on the Thanksgiving Day previous, Hughie as Captain of the Football Eleven, with the help of the other members of the team, had won the College Championship for the first time in five years. The boys of Lowell University had never been very successful in football against their old rivals at Jefferson, and the fellows were so chock-full of enthusiasm over it that they had not yet had enough opportunity to satisfy it. As each of the members of the team had arrived he had been welcomed in much the same way, but the great welcome was, of course, given to “good old Hughie” as they called him, and now that he was with them again it was possible, taking the boys’ view of it, for the work of the University to go on. [Illustration: “Good old Hughie Jenkins was back.”] As Captain Larke had said, “Hughie is entitled to all the credit we can give him. He has been a wonder at baseball because he has always kept the boys fighting hard to win, no matter what the score was, and we have won many a game just because we wanted to do our best for him, and the way he made us get out and win in the last few minutes of the big football game kind of shows that he knows how to put them over.” “That’s right,” said Kirkpatrick, who was right end on the team, “if good old Hughie hadn’t put some of the fight back in us when that old score was 0 to 0 in the last five minutes of play, and then himself kicked that field goal from Jefferson’s twenty-five-yard line, we wouldn’t have won.” “Well,” said Hughie, “this is fine all right, boys. We did win, didn’t we! and it’s very kind of you to try to give me all the credit, but if it hadn’t been for the other ten fellows on the team, I guess I couldn’t have done very much, and anyway it took eleven pretty good men to beat that team from Jefferson.” Then, turning to Johnny Everson he said, “Gee, I wish the snow would melt. I’d like to find out what kind of new fellows we have who can play baseball.”